[Text wall ahead. My apologies.]
This thread is a perfect example of why I love Kongregate and why I still come back after four extremely dynamic years. When I logged on today and saw the advertisement for KongPlus, I was pretty peeved. It seemed not only ridiculous, but totally against many of the values I thought Kong prized. A veteran of the site, however, I knew I couldn’t base my judgment on my first reaction and I patiently read the offered additions and the forum discussion over the new system. Over the course of this thread, I have had every question, issue, and qualm addressed and satisfactorily answered. Multiple admins have posted (including Emily [by proxy]) and from the few pages I read (I’ll admit I only got about five pages in before I was satisfied) I saw the staff compose calm, patient, complete, logical, and humorous answers. I feel this type of dedication to the community is difficult to come across on the internet nowadays and I have been consistently impressed by Kongregate’s standards. Because of what I have read on this thread, I can tell a lot of thought was put into KongPlus and that considerable care was taken to ensure it does not violate Kong’s principles. I now support this addition (though I probably won’t bother partaking, as I am a starving student and all) and I would like to thank the staff (specifically zShaddow, AC, and Ducky) for your dedication and patience. Far from deterring me, this new feature (or rather the way with which it was presented and addressed) will ensure I keep logging in. I am amazed as always at the exceptional quality of this site.

I dislike how tags are used unproperly on too popular games with the effect of hiding the unknown games as usual. Tags like “Fighting” shouldn’t be used on games like “thing thing”, “sonny 2” or “Enchanted cave” since that is a well-known separated genre, as it is debatable if “TDP4” falls under “Platformer”.

That’s why we need precise rules for them.

It seems to me this is the reason users vote on the tag. The idea (probably) is that the community can choose what category a game falls under without preset guidelines.

Should questions about the tag system go here, or in one of the other threads?

And failing an instantaneousness answer, I’ll just post here until told otherwise. Are the tags shown/blocked based purely off of whether the rating is negative or positive, or is there an algorithm in place to weigh + vs. – votes (such as with the comments)?

We’ve released a new feature to help players sort and find games more easily – game tags.

I have to admit, I laughed when I saw it labeled as new. :P You can’t bury the past guys.

Regardless, I see this as a huge improvement over the old system. The reason the old method collapsed was that people could tag things with whatever words they wanted. That (obviously) got out of hand pretty fast. Predefined, user-rated tags are a big improvement.

I think he means awards. They are temporary promotional challenges, similar to card challenges. To earn the award you have to achieve a certain goal on a certain game within a given time frame. In addition to getting an award on your profile, you are entered into a drawing for various prizes. There are no award challenges currently. There is also no Call of Duty award.

You have probably noticed we’re having some site slowness issues today. Here’s the story: we have a main database and a back-up database. Last night the main database had a temporary issue and we failed over to the back-up database, which is what we’re running on now. Unfortunately the back-up database is having trouble keeping up with the load, and we can’t switch back to the main database until tonight.

To reduce the load a bit for right now we are turning off the feature where you can browse badges by whether they are earned or unearned as that’s quite taxing on the database (you guys earn a lot of badges). But don’t worry, we’re only turning it off until we can get back on the main database.

And if you’re wondering, don’t blame Gamestop! They in fact are setting us up with a brand new data center with twice the capacity of our current set-up. Unfortunately it takes a while to get all the hardware, set it up, and fully test it and it may be another 6-8 weeks before we can switch to it. But we’ll be working to reduce the load on the database as much as we can in the meantime.

Thanks for your patience today!

The admins actually intentionally disabled the feature in order to reduce load on the server. Though Emily initially said they would reenable the feature later that day, I think it’s safe to assume that they are waiting until they have the new data center set up. She said that it would probably be complete in 6-8 weeks from the posts, which translate to roughly early December. So by Kongregate time, it should be re-enabled around mid February.

(Just kidding about that last part. Some of us still haven’t forgot the Kongai release date time-scale though. :P).

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